Full Transcript for #460 Lauren Bright Pacheco with Alan Beaman - Part 2

jail getting off the bus in the Department corrections down in Minard Correctional Center. They threw me to the wolves. It was a completely different kind of culture shock. It wasn't a nice, neat orderly jail where everything ran smoothly. It was a wilderness that I was dropped into and had to survive. After being in the receiving area for a period of time, I was moved into the general population and I moved into a cell that was empty. When I moved into it, it was empty and trashed, and so I moved in and I started cleaning up, and a counselor came by prison counselor and introduced himself and said what gang are you in? And I said, I'm not in a gang. I'm a neutron. And he said there's no neutrons in the West House and I said there's one now, and he said, well, you really should think about finding a group of friends that you can join up with. So I was encouraged by a government employee to join a gang in prison in order to survive. And I had been discouraged from that by other people who warned me that that would be tempting and said, if you do that, you're going to become that gang's send off dummy. If you're fighting this case, if you're saying you didn't do it, they're going to put a shank in your hand. They're going to send you after somebody. They're going to use you, even though you think that they're helping you survive, They're going to get you a life sentence for something else. And so I resisted any temptation to protect myself by surrounding myself with other people. And at that point I really began to genuinely and wholeheartedly pursue my relationship with God. I knew that I had nothing else. I was dead meat. They intended for my death from this. That's the only thing I can calculate from the environment that I was in. 00:09:30 Speaker 1: Wow, I want to talk to you about anger, because you all must have been so angry. How did you harness that anger? How did you keep it from consuming you? And I know, Alan, you and I had communicated a little bit that initially it almost derailed you. What did anger become for you? 00:09:51 Speaker 2: It was never a constructive thing for me throughout the whole experience. It was the only acceptable emotion that a man can express in prison. If you express any other emotion besides anger, you are a bitch. And that's just the way it is, and so you swallow everything else, and everything else has to morph into anger in order to be processed or expressed. And I learned very quickly to turn off all of those other feelings because they were going to get me killed. And I never turned them back on until I came home. And we'll probably talk about that's more linking. But for me, I succumbed to anger as a product of my environment, slowly, seductively, knowing that was the only emotion I could have, And I very much, for the first probably five years, was a product of my environment. I started working out, I got bigger, I got tougher, I got mouthier, and I wasn't going to take any crap from anybody, and I was in some dangerous situations. Fortunately by then I had adjusted well enough that I could keep a clear head and navigate those situations. And I truly believe God was with me throughout all of this, protecting me. Otherwise I would be dead. 00:11:24 Speaker 1: Barry and Carol, you've spoken about how you harnessed your anger and utilized it for activism. But how did you guys get linked with Jeff Erdangen and ultimately the Northwestern University School of Law. 00:11:39 Speaker 4: We first went to Jeff in terms of looking for someone to take the case as far as trying to overturn it, and he was still in private practice at that time. So we talked Jeff and he said, I'm interested, but I have to talk to Alan before or I will commit to taking the case. Goes down and sees Alan, and when he called us later after seeing Alan, he said, I don't like him, but I believe him. Did you know that Alan? 00:12:18 Speaker 2: I Jeff came down to visit me with a private investigator who had been part of law enforcement in the past, and the two of them proceeded to interrogate me for the duration of the visit. Jeff would ask some sort of straightforward questions, and then the cop would provoke me with questions about that's not what a normal person would do if they were asked that question. How come you're so different? You seem suspicious to me. It just seemed like this was a test. But at a certain point I had enough and I said, look, if you guys don't believe me. 00:12:59 Speaker 3: I don't need you. 00:13:01 Speaker 2: And I ended the visit and I went back to my cell and I thought that was the end of it, that these were not going to be that Jeffer Dangen was not going to be the person that represented me. And then he went back to Chicago and called my mom and told her the infamous I don't like him, but I believe him statement. 00:13:24 Speaker 1: And if I'm not mistaken, he didn't just like you. He ended up taking your case pro bono. 00:13:30 Speaker 2: He did, and to this day he's a very good friend, a family friend, somebody I still value his advice and opinion and can't say enough nice about. 00:13:43 Speaker 1: And how did jeff tell you that he was taking your case pro bono? 00:13:47 Speaker 4: After we'd paid him for several things along the way, he finally said, you can't afford me, and so that's when he kept it pro bono. But the deal was we were supposed to pay for Julia and for his investigator. And then eventually he came to us and said, I've got a chance to go to Northwestern and they've told me I can take along a case or two, and I'd like for you to present the people at Northwestern so he arranged for us to meet with a panel of students and with Karen Daniel and Chris Jeff. 00:14:26 Speaker 1: Then the Center on Wrongful Convictions gets involved. And this is probably what I find most infuriating about this case, because you have Jeff or Dangen, you have the Northwestern University Center on Wrongful Convictions, you have at this point the dream team

behind you, and it isn't exactly quickly unraveled and resolved at that point. 00:14:54 Speaker 2: I was in Minard when we filed the post conviction petition, and I did three and a half years in Stateville, two years in Mount Sterling, and another couple of years in Dixon before I had a hearing. So it was a good like six or seven years before we got to being able to have a hearing. What was happening was we would we would get a date set, and the judge would retire, and then we would get a date set and then the state's attorney that was handling the case would become a judge. So there were numerous changes of judges and numerous changes of states attorneys. And it seems like the way to become a judge in McLean County is to oppose a wrongful conviction case, whether it's mine or Jamie Snow or Bart McNeil, if you are a state's attorney that is fighting against someone appealing a wrongful conviction, you get to be a judge. 00:15:54 Speaker 1: And sure enough, your post conviction relief was denied yep by the McLean County Circuit Court, and your lawyer's appealed to that decision. Yes, what was the rock bottom moment for you guys? Each individually? You must have felt like sisyphus, all of you at that point. 00:16:13 Speaker 4: I don't know that it was one time frequently it would happen. I can say for me personally, it was early on. Actually, I taught high school and I was staying late one day for parent conferences, and I walked back to my classroom where I was going to hold my conferences, and there was a big sign on my door that said murderer's mother for all my parents to see. That was the rock bottom personally, Carol, I can't even imagine how that when you just feel like you're being punched by the system. Yeah, it came to the point where I was never sure when Alan was going to show up in my classroom. 00:17:03 Speaker 1: Alan, what for you was the most difficult part. You serve time in four different prisons over the course of the years that you were five. 00:17:15 Speaker 2: Really really six, but two of them I was only in for short periods of time, okay, four that I was in for longer periods of time. 00:17:23 Speaker 1: What got you through? In other words, I know you said you had to harness anger as a shield, but how did you stay sane? 00:17:32 Speaker 5: Didn't? 00:17:34 Speaker 3: I didn't. 00:17:35 Speaker 2: That's the fact is that I didn't stay sane. I got worse for a while, and while I was in Stateville Correctional Center, I was almost to the point where I was so done with all of it that if me speaking my mind and getting in somebody's face caused me to get stabbed to death, so be it. I was done. I was quite irrationally, again a product of my environment, and very much in tune with my toxic masculinity at that time, so much to the point where I actually went to a gang chief and asked if I could have a one on one fight with one of his guys, because the guy had been talking crazy to me and they knew me, and they said, beaman, everybody gets along with you, and we're going to talk to this guy. 00:18:22 Speaker 3: And he's not going to mess with you anymore. 00:18:24 Speaker 2: And I said okay, and so they talked to him, and then he did it again a couple days later, and I went back to the guy again and I said, okay, when can I get that one on one fight? Because he did not stop. They said, we're going to talk to him and that'll be that. And they chewed this kid out right in front of everybody, in the middle of the chow hall. And he wasn't trying to hear it, because why are you sticking up for that neutron. You should be taking my side. And one of the guys stood up and said, fuck it, just let Beaman kick his ass and the guy I never said a word to me again. 00:19:01 Speaker 3: That was the end of it. Again. 00:19:03 Speaker 2: I should have been dead. God was protecting me and preparing me for something. It wasn't very long after that that I was sitting in a bullpen after a visit with my parents, waiting to go back to my cell and I really had to go to the bathroom, and the chapel line was leaving the building and that was the only way I was going to get to the bathroom for the next hour. 00:19:25 Speaker 3: So I went to church because I had to peep okay, such language. 00:19:30 Speaker 2: And I sat in the chapel and I listened to the chaplain and he was talking sense. So I kept going every week. As crazy as it is. However, God is going to get a hold of you. That's how he's going to do it. And grateful for the fact that God reached out to me that way, and that I had an opportunity to look at myself and say, this is not who I have to be. And at that point I was finally able to slowly and progressive lee, let down my guard and care about another person in my environment and say, there's more to life than surviving this hell hole. And I'm going to be a good person even if it kills me. And I think that's I don't get a little tear Europe. 00:20:21 Speaker 3: Sorry, but I. 00:20:22 Speaker 2: Don't know exactly where rock bottom was, but I know that's where I started to ascend out of it. 00:20:27 Speaker 1: Wow, Thank goodness for a full bladder. 00:20:33 Speaker 3: The problem I have a lot. 00:20:36 Speaker 1: It was finding that community, the spiritual community. Yeah, that set you free from the anger. 00:20:45 Speaker 5: Yeah. 00:21:04 Speaker 1: So on May twenty second, two thousand and eight, the Illinois Supreme Court overturned Alan's conviction because the prosecution had withheld exculpatory evidence that would have been likely to have changed the jury's verdict of guilty. And after thirteen years in prison for a murder that you did not commit, you walked out of jail on June twenty seventh, two thousand and eight, wearing a Chicago Bears T shirt, jeans, and a baseball hat after posting ten percent of a two hundred and fifty thousand dollars bond. What emotions did you, guys experience in that moment when your eyes first locked on the other side of those walls? What

emotions? 00:21:57 Speaker 3: Just? 00:21:58 Speaker 4: Wow? 00:22:00 Speaker 3: Is this real? Pinch me? 00:22:04 Speaker 4: I can tell you what we did after my brother and sister in law had come down with us to pick him up, and we loaded him in the car and we stopped at Denny's. Denny's he ordered a steak and was shocked when they gave him a real knife. And cell phones had come into being at that. 00:22:32 Speaker 3: And our cell phones were ringing off the. 00:22:34 Speaker 4: Wall and they were flip phones, of course, just passing phones around the car for him to talk on to different people. And then we stopped at a wayside and there was a swing set at the wayside and he had to go swing on the swing set. So every time I see the picture of that, I tear up. 00:23:01 Speaker 1: Alan. You just take me to that moment, your feet hitting the ground outside. 00:23:09 Speaker 3: You know. 00:23:09 Speaker 2: I think at that point there was no like Catharsis or it was just Wow, this is awesome, and I'm loving every minute of this. And I don't know what happened that day. I was on my phone the whole time. It was a phone call after a phone call after a phone call, of all the people that were calling, Oh my gosh, I heard, and I didn't really process until we got home and they were pressed at my house and I did a brief interview there and then everybody went to bed and it was just me and I stayed up all night just experiencing the first time I could just Oh, I can go outside. Oh I can go over to the fridge and make a sandwich. I can play with the dog. Oh I can go back outside again. 00:23:53 Speaker 1: All the things that seemed so obvious and simple before. 00:23:58 Speaker 2: Yeah, it's the little thing we take so much for granted from just ordinary life. And so I just experienced those all night, and I watched the sunrise and then promptly began complaining about the price of gas and the speed of my internet. 00:24:16 Speaker 1: But even on top of that, in many ways, you're out, But the nightmare is not over, not at all. Still, Yeah, you still remain charged with Jennifer's murder. Yes, and the office of McLean County State's Attorney announced that it intended to retry you. Yeah, that must have been such an emotional roller coaster for you all. 00:24:40 Speaker 2: I knew that was the deal from the moment I was heading back to the county jail. I knew that I was bonding out. I wasn't exonerated. I was bonding out to be retried. But there was a lot of hope in this because now we've got this momentum of investigative power. All the stuff I've been trying for the last thirteen years to get them to test the damn DNA, trying to get them to follow up on leads that never got followed. I've been trying to just get a real honest evidentiary review and some real honest detective work out of these people. And now I have investigative power and they have to let me do it. And to this day, I believe that's why they dropped the charges. They did it right after the judge

that was handling the case appeared to agree that we were going to be allowed to test all that DNA BAM charges dropped Yep. 00:25:43 Speaker 1: On January twenty ninth, two thousand and nine, all charges against you were dropped. Yes, and then you filed for petition for a certificate of innocence Yes. What became your family's new driving motivation at that point? 00:26:01 Speaker 2: And why I've been out long enough that the immediate elation and feeling of being on cloud nine has begun to fade, and I'm dealing with post traumatic stress disorder. 00:26:17 Speaker 3: I'm dealing with the I've. 00:26:20 Speaker 2: Now turned the valve on, so all those emotions that I had turned off and I'm trying to process them. And what happens if I feel just one small grain of grief, All of the grief that I've been storing up for the last thirteen years comes out all at once, and I realized I need to get help, and so we're, yeah, we're pursuing these continuing legal remedies, but I'm also going to therapy. I'm seeing a psychiatrist, I'm on zoloft. I'm just trying to figure out who I am again, because I've stored up thirteen years of this cookie cutter imagination of what life is supposed to be like after I get out, and oh, my gosh, that's not what life is like after I get out. 00:27:09 Speaker 1: I think it's so incredible that you were able to do the work that you needed to do at that point, and that you had the wherewithal to understand that you needed to do it. Look, it had been what four thousand, eight hundred and thirty six days. You went in when you were twenty twenty two, you got out when you were thirty six. It's got to be beyond surreal. 00:27:38 Speaker 2: I think some of it was surreal and some of it was too real. It's like the reverse of prison. The first year is the hardest, right The first year in prison is it just completely tears you down and undoes your humanity. And then after that you're just numb and you're just doing time. And after release that first probably the four months was just absolutely wonderful and everybody's so happy to see me, and oh my gosh, isn't it great. I'm not in prison And every day that's what's at the forefront of my thoughts, I'm not in prison, right, And slowly you get into real life and you start to take some things for granted, and every now and then I just be driving and I'm in traffic, and I'm a little annoyed, and then I suddenly realize I'm not in prison, and I have a nice day. But as the hyper alertness started to develop for me, and I'm aware of every cop that's anywhere near me, and I'm aware of anybody that looked at me cross eyed, and people have criticized me openly in different forms of media, and I have lost a job because someone thinks I'm a murderer, and it starts to set in that I'm not free. I'm still being victimized by this same system, and I still have to continue to fight to clear my name. 00:29:01 Speaker 3: And that's the COI. 00:29:04 Speaker 1: A certificate of innocence, right. 00:29:06

Speaker 2: I think at a certain point, I my my trauma and my poor functioning because of it made it really difficult to xigneries. We're really it's really hard to love us, not because you don't see something awesome in us, but because we're sometimes stuck in this trauma and you take this long term suffering that is pushed way down deep inside of you, and it's and I'm not taking anything away from veterans or anything like that, they were in some place even more dangerous for less time, and I was in some place that was also dangerous for more time. And so I really equate it to being similar, but a completely different versi of that same PTSD, where I think it takes longer to unravel it, and it's not as easily noticed, and it's certainly not as publicly supported to have trauma from prison as it is to have fought for your country Again. I started getting help, and the charges got dropped and we began pursuing the certificate of innocence. And it was just a couple of months after the charges were dropped that I met Gretchen at church. 00:30:36 Speaker 1: You're listening to Wrongful Conviction with Lauren Bright Pacheco. You can listen to this and all the Lava for Good podcasts one week early and ad free by subscribing to Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts. One of the things that I love most about your story, Alan and your experiences that it has not a happy ending, but the best possible ending in many ways, and part of that is the fact that you have a beautiful family now of your own, that you had your family supporting you throughout your incarceration. But you met your lovely wife, Gretchen two years after you were out, or you met you married two years after. Okay, so you tell me how you two first crossed paths and. 00:31:32 Speaker 6: Where it was at church. It was a youth group fundraiser and I was there with my daughter was she's six five, and Alan walked in the door and he walked past, and he had just been repainting or something, and so he had on this red and black flannel jacket and he was covered in paint and he walked past, and I said, oh, he's cute, and didn't realize who he was. I had semi followed his story. Then he sat with his parents and they were facing me, and I was like, why did they look familiar to me? And then it clicked. I was like, oh, my god, that's Alan Beeman. And I had my daughter, I'm like scooch over and I took a picture of the back of his head and sent it to my friend. 00:32:26 Speaker 1: Not knowing you were photographing your future hust correct. 00:32:29 Speaker 2: Yeah, she's not telling the whole story there. 00:32:31 Speaker 1: Go ahead, but I want to hear from your point of view. 00:32:33 Speaker 2: Then, So I noticed her that night as a cute chick I hadn't seen before at church, and she was wearing a Bear's hoodie, and we've already established that's important to me. And our daughter, Alana was five at the time and we hadn't met yet. Gretchen looked very young. People will still always say that. When she

tells people her age, they're like, oh, you didn't. You don't look that old. And so I wasn't sure if she was a single mom or a sister. So I just noticed her and that was about it. And then Alana said mom and about something, and then I was like, okay, that's a mom. And a week or so later, the church newsletter released new member pictures and I see a picture of her in that, and she's wearing a different Bears hoodie. So I'm like, Okay, she's the real deal. She's got two of them, and I could tell from reading the bio that she might be available. And I was just bold and audacious enough and curious enough that I decided to send her a Facebook friend request. I had just started on Facebook because the charges had been dropped, and I decided it's time to put myself out there and experience the world and dove headfirst into social media, which I'm glad I did because I'm my wife. 00:34:01 Speaker 1: Did you have any concerns or reservations, Gretchen, I know that you did a little bit of your own inquiring about Alan. 00:34:10 Speaker 6: Yeah. So I live in Rockford, so where I grew up most of my life. So I saw the articles in the paper, and I saw the news segments on TV and everything. I wasn't like, oh my god, let me research this guy. I just knew of him. And then after he got released in June, I was working at a local credit union and we had an older lady who came in and I was reading the newspaper and it said Alan Beeman was released, and I made a comment and Maggie was like, Ah, I know Alan, I've known him since he was this big and oh he never did it. 00:34:48 Speaker 5: I know. 00:34:49 Speaker 6: I've believed in his innocence from the beginning. And so that was really the first person that I had met that knew him and said good things about him, and I believed in his innocence from reading everything I had read. I didn't grow up the same way Alan did. I grew up in a housing project, and I saw injustice happen all of the time, and I saw police come in and arrest a black person just because they were by the crime that happened. And so I grew up not believing that the police always were right and did the correct thing. So after I met Alan and knew of his case, it was, of course this could happen. 00:35:36 Speaker 3: Of course it could. 00:35:37 Speaker 6: I've seen it happen. 00:35:39 Speaker 1: That's so interesting. So it was for you confirmation in many ways of what you knew, unfortunately to be true. And for Alan's family it was a very rude awakening into the injustices that many other sections of our society face on a daily basis. I love that in your union, in your marriage, you in a way got some of that lost time back, Alan, because you had your beautiful daughter, Alana already, and then you too, welcomed Adelaide shortly after you guys married two years, I guess. 00:36:23 Speaker 6: Yeah, two years and will you just a year and a half. 00:36:25 Speaker 1: Year and a half, will you tell me her full name? And the importance of one of those. 00:36:29 Speaker 2: Names, so I wanted to name her Liberty and Gretchen wasn't having it, and her name needed to start with an A, because that's just she wanted to keep the pattern for some reason. And we settled on Adelaide, but I really still wanted to name her Liberty, and I got her to concede that if she was born on the fourth of July, because she was due on like the tenth or the twelfth, then we would do that, but otherwise not, And so she was born on the twelfth, and she was born on the twelfth, and they handed me the paperwork for the birth certificate and I wrote Adelaide Jeane Liberty Beamon on the birth certificate, and I handed it to Gretchen and I said, you can cross off anything you want to, and she glared at me over her eyes. I rolled her eyes yes, and handed the clipboard back to me and said, fine. 00:37:35 Speaker 1: Your husband said that exoneries are very difficult to love. 00:37:39 Speaker 6: I wouldn't say that. He might say that, but I wouldn't say those words. 00:37:44 Speaker 1: But you've seen what he's had to go through to be the husband and the father that he wants to be. How would you explain to people the residual impact that the wrongful conviction has had on your husband emotionally. What are the challenges that people couldn't even possible comprehend or see. 00:38:13 Speaker 6: It's really simple things that a normal person that hasn't been through this experience, they just would never do something like that. We went out to have some drinks with friends and the beer bottle was left on the table, and he's, like, my DNA's on that. If somebody comes after me to the bar and gets in a fight and picks up that beer bottle and hits somebody over the head with them and kills them, my fingerprint is on that. So it's things like that you just don't that you don't think of. And like his gum, he would even throw a gum away in a garbage can just because his DNA's on it. 00:38:49 Speaker 1: And suddenly, if you've been in a situation where you were convicted of something you didn't do, you're going to go out of your way to make were that can't happen again, even though you can't control everything. 00:39:07 Speaker 3: Yeah, I was. 00:39:08 Speaker 2: I went to my therapist's office and I was in the waiting room and she had magazines sitting in the office, and it was obvious the address labels showed that she brought them from home, and I told my therapist, if something ever happened to you, they could argue that I had access to your address through the address labels on the magazines you have in your office. The next week, I came in and all the address labels were torn off of the magazines. And that's what we used to have to use to do in prison. When you got mail from your loved ones, you tore the reach for an addresses off them and flushed them down the toilet because you didn't want your fellow inmates to get a hold of your family's address. It's just you're constantly aware of all of these potential dangers you shouldn't

have to worry about. And I'll tell you, I make myself throw things in a public garbage can because I just I can't do it anymore. I have to be free, and I. 00:40:16 Speaker 1: Have to that's your immersion therapy, and. 00:40:19 Speaker 2: It's terrifying, and it's yeah, wow. 00:40:23 Speaker 6: On another day to day basis, all of our kids' friends, we've had to let them know because we don't feel comfortable with them being in our house unless they know his story, and we just don't want it to be a surprise to them, because some people believe that he has a certificate of innocence and he's innocent. Other people believe the cops arrested him, so he must be guilty. 00:40:47 Speaker 2: Both of my daughters have had friends whose parents took one look at me and said, wait a minutes, I'm not sure if I want my kid around your kid. 00:41:01 Speaker 1: I would sincerely hope, in light of most recent news, that is completely gone at this point, because in January, I. 00:41:11 Speaker 3: Know it's not, but you would think it would be. So. 00:41:13 Speaker 1: In January of twenty fifteen, the then Governor Pat Quinn pardoned Alan based on actual innocence, which cleared the path for long overdue accountability in the form of compensation, which in March of twenty twenty four finally happened the town of Normal. The Normal Town Council settled the lawsuit in your favor to the tune of five point four million. What more could anybody ask for in terms of knowing beyond a shadow of a doubt. 00:42:00 Speaker 2: This latest development, with the civil suit and the settlement for that, you would think that's enough. But this is how powerful the word of just one police officer is. In the United States, of America. This is how powerful the word of one state's attorney, you know, when this person who has public recognition for being an officer of the law says I think it was him that did it. There are still people, in spite of all of that evidence, that can't get behind the reasonable conclusion that I was framed and that I was railroaded, and that I was wrongfully convicted, and that I am absolutely entitled to my liberty and my family is absolutely entitled to their dignity. 00:43:04 Speaker 1: Thank you for listening to Wrongful Conviction. I'm Lauren Bright Pacheco. Please support your local innocence organizations and go to the links in the episode description to see how you can help. I'd like to thank our executive producers Jason Flam, Jeff Kempler, and Kevin Wardis, as well as our producers Annie Chelsea, Kathleen Fink, and Jackie Pauley. This series is produced, edited, and hosted by me Lauren Bright Pacheco. Our senior producer is Kara Kornhaber. Story editing by Hannah Biel, research by Shelby Sorels, mixing and sound design by Nick Massetti, with additional production by Jeff Clyborne. Our theme music is by Jay Ralph. Be sure to follow us across all social media platforms at Lava for Good and at Wrongful Conviction. You can also follow me on all platforms at Lauren Bright Pacheco. Wrongful Conviction is a production of Lava for Good Podcasts in association with Signal come Pany Number one